Tag: Donald Trump

The walls are closing in on Donald Trump, pundits and politicians now agree. Michael Cohen has turned on him. What else does he know? There is no proof of Russian collusion, but campaign finance violations will do the job. Robert Mueller is taking no prisoners. James Comey brags that he “got away” with FBI agents grilling General Michael Flynn without counsel present, thrilled to ruin a patriot who joined Trump’s orbit. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer wag their disapproving fingers at Trump with cameras rolling in the Oval Office because, well, he’s an unworthy President.

And, yet …

WASHINGTON (Reuters): The number of Americans filing applications for jobless benefits tumbled to near a 49-year low (in early December), which could ease concerns about a slowdown in the labor market and economy.

Democrats/Media: Trump and the Republicans must be stopped.

The Wall Street Journal: State and local government investment in roads, bridges, buildings and other infrastructure hasn’t returned to its previous peak, but it is now showing signs—late in the expansion—of a real recovery. Bigger state and local tax collections, propelled in part by an acceleration in sales-tax receipts from consumer spending, is boosting capital projects and driving a municipal borrowing boom.

Democrats/Media: Trump and the Republicans must be stopped.

Breitbart: In October, imports used in computer manufacturing amounted to over $40 billion. That represents a savings of about $640 million over what they would have paid for those products a year earlier – more than half of the additional tariff payments. A big part of the tariffs are actually being paid by foreign manufacturers who now receive fewer dollars for their goods. People who think they have a better understanding of trade than the president like to mock Trump for saying that China and others pay tariffs but evidence suggests Trump has it right.

Democrats/Media: Trump and the Republicans must be stopped.

The Daily Caller: U.S. oil production hit 11.7 million barrels a day during the week ending Nov. 16. That’s unchanged from the previous week, but up significantly from the week ending Nov. 9. Oil companies are pulling more than 2 million barrels more out of the ground now than during the same time period in 2017, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported. That’s a 21-percent increase in oil production in the past year.

Democrats/Media: Trump and the Republicans must be stopped.

Rush Limbaugh: “I feel duty-bound to warn you and to give you a heads-up about what we’re gonna face. Donald Trump’s gonna have perhaps the most embattled presidency in — well, certainly in our lifetimes, and I dare say maybe in modern American history. They’re not going to quit and they are a new kind of stupid. They are not logical. They make no sense whatsoever. But they are going to have the media on their side, and that’s the danger.”

Rush uttered these words Nov. 22, 2016. Sadly, he was deadly accurate. But there is solace to be found in knowing that Donald Trump never quits.

Until Saturday evening, members of the media and Democrats (and some establishment Republican elites) held up President Donald Trump as the living embodiment of a person who has become unhinged. That was before an obscure, marginally talented and vile so-called comedian named Michelle Wolf was invited by the White House Correspondents Association to spew one-liners during its annual gala. Wolf took “unhinged” to new extremes, and, in doing so, exposed how unhinged, dare we say deranged, our left wing mainstream media remains since the unthinkable happened last November 2016. Wolf exposed them because she had them laughing uproariously at her mean spirited monologue.

Trump arguably is more unfiltered or uncensored (by Washington standards) than unhinged, but he continues to irritate even some members of the media who retain a few threads of credibility. Columnist Peggy Noonan, to name one. In her weekly Wall Street Journal column April 27, Noonan railed against Trump’s “latest unhingement” during last week’s call-in to the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” morning show. She took issue with Trump ranting about James Comey, the FBI, the vicious take down of his nominee to head the Veterans’ Administration, the “crazy Stormy Daniels deal”, and fake news.

Presidents traditionally have not spouted off. Everything was scripted and focus group tested before it was uttered. But consider the contrast between a wide ranging Trump rant, such as the one Noonan scolded about, and a well-crafted Barack Obama, fully hinged speech.

Trump: James Comey is “liar and a leaker”. Unhinged again. And true by all accounts.

Obama: “If you like your healthcare plan, you will be able to keep your healthcare plan. If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor.” Not unhinged. Completely untrue.

There are numerous additional examples. The point is that when Trump goes off script he nearly always does so to further expose hypocrisy, media deceit and corrupt Washington insiders. And now there is new polling strongly suggesting that tightly hinged Republican lawmakers will be the reason Democrats could win back Congressional seats in the 2018 mid-terms. Writing for Townhall.com, Timothy Daughtry reports:

“A new poll of 1,000 likely voters by McLaughlin and Associates … (indicates) that the ‘Blue Wave’ so hoped for by the liberal media is not at all inevitable and that there is still a possible path to Republican victory in November. (The bad news in the polling results is) Republican voters are wanting results, and many in the GOP base see Republican leadership as supporting the swamp they were sent to Washington to drain.

There are but a few nuggets of encouraging data in the McLaughlin poll for DC Republicans, one being that “the generic ballot for Congress in the November election is essentially tied at 44% for Democrats and 43% for Republicans.”

Other poll results:

Among Democrats, 65% trust their party to do what it says it will do. By contrast, only 15% of Republicans trust their own party to carry out its promises, and that dismal percentage drops to 9% among the conservative base.

Overall, 46% of voters polled say the Republican leadership is “supporting the swamp that President Trump promised to drain.”

Trump’s job approval rating of 45% (in this poll) is higher than the job approval of the GOP Congress. Overall, 84% of Republicans and 73% of conservatives approve of Trump’s performance.

Different polls reveal different trends. The McLaughlin poll “dispels the … narrative that President Trump is a drain on the ticket.” But another poll released April 30, by Reuters/Ipsos, finds that a generally negative view of Trump among millennials does not predispose them to lean heavily in favor of Democrat lawmakers.

“The online survey of more than 16,000 registered voters ages 18 to 34 shows their support for Democrats over Republicans for Congress slipped by about 9 percentage points over the past two years, to 46 percent overall. And they increasingly say the Republican Party is a better steward of the economy.”

The report did not find a surge of millennials who’ve shifted to “overt support of Republicans (at 28% it’s about the same as a similar poll two years ago). Yet, heading into the 2018 mid-terms, these millennials also say “they were undecided, would support a third-party candidate or not vote at all.”

Polls ebb and flow, but almost all point to hapless Washington lawmakers in both parties who fail again and again to get out of their own ways, and thereby continue to sacrifice trust and voter approval. Meanwhile, Trump soldiers on despite the black cloud of the Mueller investigation and daily media attempts to diminish his administration.

But nothing can diminish the successful nomination of Supreme Court Judge Neil Gorsuch, the defanging of the Obamacare mandate, restored relations with Israel, historic tax cuts and reforms that are changing American citizen’s lives and lifting their optimism, the hope of fairer trade with China, and, suddenly, the prospect of a denuked North Korea and a unified Korean Peninsula.

Christmas is arriving early in 2018. About 11 months early, to be precise. On Thursday, January 25, North Carolina retirees began receiving their monthly state retirement benefit payments.

According to the office of North Carolina State Treasurer Dale R. Folwell, payments to retirees have increased by a total of $5.7 million this month. The windfall was triggered by two developments. One is the very well publicized federal tax reform signed by President Donald Trump after Congressional Republicans came through with a bill late last year.

The other development flew under the radar. An obscure state entity, the Retirement Systems Division (RSD), simply did its job beating the clock on an IRS deadline that was set after Trump signed sweeping tax cuts into law.

Among those cuts are federal taxes deducted from 2018 benefit payments to North Carolina retirees and benefit recipients. The RSD Operations Team within the N.C. Department of State Treasurer was able to update the tables ahead of the IRS’s deadline.

“I’m very proud of our team for taking the initiative so quickly after the new tax law was passed by Congress and signed by President Trump. While we are in the check delivery business, it involves more than just buying ink and stamps,” said Treasurer Folwell. “This is a testament to the outstanding job that our career public servants do to serve government workers.”

More than $500 million is paid out each month to more than 312,000 retirees and benefit recipients.

“Our team, led by Tom Causey and Susan Fordham, decided not to wait until February to enact this increase in our members’ benefit payments,” explained Steve Toole, Executive Director of RSD. “By updating these tax schedules sooner, our members will see larger January benefit payments.”

“For centuries,” writes our frequent RESOLVE contributor Walter B. Bull Jr., “rapid radical change has been designated as a sea-change.” In fact, William Shakespeare used the phrase as long ago as 1610 when penning a lyric.

American society is witnessing a dramatic sea-change that has been intensified by the election of President Donald Trump and the mainstream media’s intent to derail, if not end, his presidency. But the change, writes Bull, began toward the end of the previous century.

“Various electronic devices were developed to record, categorize, store and analyze large amounts of data at light speed. … At the same time, information delivery systems, mainly televisions, became available to most households for use as an entertainment gathering focal point.”

Radio and television changed the way we experienced historic, including tragic, events, such as the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the space shuttle Challenger’s mid-air explosion and, most chillingly, Sept. 11, 2001.

Now, in the era of Trump, news and analysis delivery, extending to laptops, tablets and smartphones, is being de-emphasized, replaced, Bull points out, by “brash claims or subtle messaging (Trump is mentally unstable) with an intent that goes beyond delivery of basic facts.”

The sea change playing out before us as 2018 begins is driven by two forces working in lockstep. The Democrat Party, now completely devoid of moderates, is lurching further and further into a state of frothing-at-the-mouth, radical progressivism. And the mainstream media, of similar mindset, questions nothing and gleefully advances the agenda.

These two camps, so obsessed with diminishing Trump, seem no longer to care they are diminishing themselves. The FBI and Justice Department, as evidenced by the existence of the phony “Steele dossier”, apparently are not afraid of being diminished, as well.

No single news story demonstrates the impact of the media-fueled Democrat agenda to obstruct Trump and the Republican Congressional majority more than the passage of tax cuts at year’s end.

It’s very clear that the tax bill passed by both the House and Senate (Dec. 19) is indisputably unpopular among Americans. But the reasons for that unpopularity are much less clear. Left-wing bias in the media likely has a lot to do with it.

National Review further pointed out that formerly reliable wire service Associated Press reported passage of the bill via Twitter as providing “steep tax cuts for businesses, the wealthy”. Talking points, not journalism.

As we move into mid-January, about a month after the bill’s passage, most media outlets are straining to avoid almost daily evidence that tax cuts for businesses are having the effect Republicans forecast all along (even as polls reflected a skeptical public). Thankfully, the Washington Examiner shared what its reporters learned when they reviewed a meticulous bit of tallying by Americans for Tax Reform.

A list of 40 firms offering millions of employees bonuses and customers fee cuts has surged to 164 in just 10 days as the likely financial benefit of President Trump’s tax reform has started to settle in.

Perhaps, retorts the media’s mainstreamers, adrift in their turbulent sea. On to other narratives they turn even as Americans rejoice in economic liberation. Trump is a racist, an insane one at that.

Signed three executive orders aimed at cracking down on international criminal organizations.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions created new National Public Safety Partnership, a cooperative initiative with cities to reduce violent crimes.

Accountability

Trump has nominated 73 federal judges and won his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

Ordered ethical standards including a lobbying ban.

Called for a comprehensive plan to reorganize the executive branch.

Ordered an overhaul to modernize the digital government.

Called for a full audit of the Pentagon and its spending.

Combatting opioids

First, the president declared a Nationwide Public Health Emergency on opioids.

His Council of Economic Advisors played a role in determining that overdoses are underreported by as much as 24 percent.

The Department of Health and Human Services laid out a new five-point strategy to fight the crisis.

Justice announced it was scheduling fentanyl substances as a drug class under the Controlled Substances Act.

Justice started a fraud crackdown, arresting more than 400.

The administration added $500 million to fight the crisis.

On National Drug Take Back Day, the Drug Enforcement Agency collected 456 tons.

Protecting life

In his first week, Trump reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy that blocks some $9 billion in foreign aid being used for abortions.

Worked with Congress on a bill overturning an Obama regulation that blocked states from defunding abortion providers.

Published guidance to block Obamacare money from supporting abortion.

Helping veterans

Signed the Veterans Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act to allow senior officials in the Department of Veterans Affairs to fire failing employees and establish safeguards to protect whistleblowers.

The markets referred to daily in the financial press are composed of Wall Street trading on regulated stock exchanges, less formal Over the Counter (NASDAQ) markets, organized commodity exchanges worldwide, and specialized trading in major financial centers across the globe.

Old timers often refer to price reporting as “the tape”, a reference to a 19th century telegraphic system that reported individual security transactions. By extension, one “fighting the tape” meant going against factual trends (i.e., the markets are poised to remain positive) because he presumes to be better informed. This also would be known as a contrarian.

In a vast industrial sector, price levels are indicative of anticipated corporate performance. Recent markets that have risen to record breaking levels have given huge thumbs up to GOP economics and the leadership of President Donald J. Trump.

High speed electronic data transfers have sent Edison’s ticker tape to museums. Modern trading desks are where authority to assume billions of dollars of risk is granted to alert young people who may not have reached their 30th birthdays.

Many believe the free market performance in a competitive marketplace driven by perfect competition is the most reliable indicator of future pricing of equities and commodities. Perfect competition is defined as the situation prevailing in a market in which buyers and sellers are so numerous and well informed that all elements of monopoly are absent, and the market price of a commodity is beyond the control of any single individual buyer or seller. It is a classical economic theory.

The world’s trading in wheat, crude oil, strategic metals and international markets for a nation’s currency, provide spot pricing (today) or a fixed future price defined by delivery at distant point of time. A user of cotton, for example, will set his raw material cost by purchasing a given amount of the commodity at a fixed price for future delivery. Sellers of cotton, farmers for example, eliminate market risk by selling their anticipated production for future delivery.

There are many investors who enter the market as speculators and their risk is their own capital based on an individual analysis of market conditions. Publicly traded stocks anticipate corporate earnings and dividends and a rising equity price indicates belief in an enterprise’s growth over time. Collective wisdom, many economists believe, has a superior predictive capability.

So, today’s “tape” is saying that tax reductions, less regulation and decentralization of decision making is good for most Americans. Anticipated growth seems to be a more laudable goal than redistribution, espoused by the left.

Let’s turn to the anti-Trump political climate that emanates from believers in progressivism. They believe so strongly in government control they are unrealistic in their analysis of public data. They are fighting the tape.

The Trump assertive leadership, while something new to Washington, has found favor among Americans. Wall Street performance says so and all the tales of gloom and doom from the disciples of the FDR New Deal and the Johnson Great Society are clearly backward looking using faulty economic logic. Similarly flawed logic was expressed, ahead of Trump’s election, by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who predicted that a Trump victory would trigger an economic collapse from which the United States might never recover.

Current Democrat party leadership has adopted a policy they have called “The Resistance.” This is proving to be not very useful thinking to combat international threats stirring in North Korea and Iran to world peace and prosperity. It is a policy risk that is devoid of constructive thinking at a time when it may be clear to voters that policy changes are urgently needed.

The party of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), California Gov. Jerry Brown, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is not the party of FDR, Kennedy, or even Barack Obama. It offers no ideas about production and preaches consumption with fairness predicated on a system that buries individual responsibility.

American success is due to creative individuals who shoulder responsibility, show up on time and take pride in a job well done. Collective performance leads to collective prosperity. Yet the Democrat Party continues fighting the tape.

It is no secret that North Carolina will be targeted by outside Democrat funding in next year’s mid-term elections. In their quest to retake a majority in the U.S. House and state General Assembly, Democrats need to shake up North Carolina. But there also is a not-so-well-kept secret that will confound this effort. Like many thriving states governed by Republican-controlled legislatures, North Carolina’s economic engine is roaring and it’s prospects for growth are soaring.

In 2011, when Republicans won their General Assembly majority, North Carolina’s unemployment rate exceeded 10 percent, House Speaker Tim Moore recalled during a recent address before the Moore County Republican Men’s Club in Pinehurst. Moore’s message certainly resonates with Republicans, who have seen that rate plunge to around four percent, but it’s difficult to comprehend how Democrats will be able to disparage this and other economic data points on the 2018 election stump. But disparage they will.

Listening to Moore’s summation of the state’s dynamic economy, we could not help feeling a tinge of melancholy as well. This same story of prosperity and growth was making headlines in 2016 but Republicans and, specifically, Governor Pat McCrory’s re-election campaign, managed to underplay it. This is mind boggling in retrospect.

Let’s not repeat this mistake during the 2018 campaign. If the campaign narrative is about the economy, N.C. Republicans should continue to be well represented in Raleigh and Washington. But messaging discipline and clarity can’t be taken for granted. The key points shared by Speaker Moore are these:

The state’s tax structure and regulatory environment are attracting new businesses and encouraging established businesses to expand.

89,000 new jobs were added during a 12-month period ending September 2017.

North Carolina has seen a $4 billion swing from debt to savings in six years and has achieved a Triple-A bond rating from the three major agencies. Only 11 other states share this top rating.

The state’s unemployment insurance tax fund carries a surplus, which is part of $1.8 billion in “rainy day” reserves.

Strong economic data, while difficult for Democrats to refute, is frequently misrepresented by Democrat Governor Roy Cooper, and others, as resulting solely from the repeal of the so-called “bathroom bill” (HB2) after Cooper was sworn in last January. A complicit mainstream media is more than willing to let them get away with overlooking the fact North Carolina has been turning around since 2011 under Republican majorities in the state House and Senate. Consider this exchange between Cooper and CNBC after the network said Amazon should select multiple North Carolina markets as the home of Amazon’s planned HQ2 headquarters.

A CNBC reporter sat down with Gov. Roy Cooper on Monday to ask about (HB2 repeal). Cooper said moving beyond HB2 and his election a year ago demonstrates to the business, sports and entertainment sectors that North Carolina is a welcoming state.

“We’re sending a strong message we’ve taken a big step,” Cooper said. “That’s why these companies have come back on my assurances that North Carolina is moving in the right direction.”

In the May 18, 20-21, 2017 Civitas Institute Political Parties NC poll (N=600) — the most recent statewide poll — when asked, “If the election for North Carolina State Legislature were held today, would you be voting for the Republican candidate (32%), the Democratic candidate (47%), Neither one/Other/Independent (8%), or Don’t Know/Undecided/Need More Info (13%). These are the highest percentage for Democratic candidates (47%) for the State Legislature and the lowest percentage for the Republican candidates (32%) in the 34 polls conducted for Civitas since October 2010.